For a couple of years now, Rupert Goold has been the director who could do no wrong. From his multi‑award-winning Macbeth to the multi‑million-pound box office of Oliver! Goold has had the golden touch. It was, therefore, surprising when Lear opened in Liverpool last autumn to distinctly muted notices. Too much directorial flamboyance, came the cry, and insufficient examination of the worst example of inheritance tax planning ever seen in drama.

Mercifully, this Seventies-dress production has managed to shed its tricksy excesses on the journey down the M6. What remains is a lovely, easy fluidity. Goold brilliantly dislodges the play from the daunting realms of the mythic where it too often nests and gives it instead the compelling, accessible-to-all stamp of a quality soap opera. Albion might be disintegrating but so, more crucially, are a family and an old man’s mind.

It’s unlikely, though, that Pete Postlethwaite is the Lear of anyone’s dreams. He looks frail and seedy, like someone down on his luck in a bookie’s, rather than a monarch of the realm, and is very vocally strained. Incongruously, he uses a microphone to make himself heard on the blasted heath. He’s far better at the later fragility, when he wanders around Dover in a floral dress.

It’s fortunate, then, that a rather shaky centre is propped up by such excellence. On Giles Cadle’s down-at-heel set, which has the perfect low‑rent look of a Shane Meadows film, Caroline Faber and Charlotte Randle are elegant evil personified as Goneril and Regan, the latter doing unspeakable things to Gloucester’s eyeballs. Tobias Menzies’s athletic Edgar reminds us why, in this chaotic kingdom, good has to go undercover to survive.

Occasional cherishably human touches are typically Gooldian: Postlethwaite sings a catch from My Way during the opening scene, and the Fool (Forbes Masson) sums up the heath’s absurdity with Singin’ in the Rain. Rich, detailed and highly recommended.
 
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